1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a printing system, a printing device, a client device for the printing system, a printing method, a printing program, and a recording medium for the program, which allow estimation of the amount of ink needed for a printing operation.
2. Related Art
With related-art color printers, the amount of ink remaining can be checked on PC (personal computer) screens for colors of YMCK or others. The problem is that there is no indication whether the amount of ink remaining is sufficient to complete the next printing operation (images included) or not.
As a solution for such a problem, a method of calculating the amount of ink remaining prior to printing to determine whether the amount of ink is sufficient to complete the printing. More specifically, the method calculates the amount of ink needed for a printing operation by going through process steps for original images prior to printing. The process steps include color conversion, color correction, halftone process, or others, those having been generally performed during printing using printers.
The problem with this method is that it takes a long time to calculate the required amount of ink for the next printing. This is due to the enormous amount of processing information.
JP-A-2000-71582 (refer to column 0047, page 7) describes another technique for calculating the amount of ink needed for printing images without difficulty. The calculation operation is executed based on an average value of image tones, and with this technique, the operation load is said to be reduced.
The problem with this technique is that the required amount of ink is not calculated with accuracy. This is because the calculation operation is based on the average value of image tones.